because ... well ... why not ...?

it's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

Saturday, August 19th

_19:43PM

Going Forward:

I'm sitting here tonight as Kevin Coppa is uploading the ISO for the candidate DVD master for Going Back onto the very same server you're reading this off of. Might as well do something with all this incoming bandwidth I have out here and barely use, since vastly more bytes of data are normally spilling out of here onto the net than I'm ever pulling in.

I certainly appreciate having someone as talented as Kevin do the authoring. I usually end up authoring DVDs for eight-to-twelve movies in a year myself, but I don't claim to be especially good at it. It probably doesn't help that most of the time I do it because we need them right away and nobody else has managed to get them done before the deadline...and nobody else is insane enough to forego sleeping long enough to get them completed and shipped in time. But in this case, there are only a few minor changes I need to check on since the previous version, and as long as they all check out, then it's off to the replicating plant with it...comfortably before we're even in sight of the last minute.

I picked October 17th to be the official street date for the DVD release, which gives me just enough time to have everything ready with only a small amount of frenzied panicking along the way. At least as long as everything goes as planned--which, as I'm sure you know, always happens.

And, if by some rare twist of fate, it doesn't...well...I'm sure giving up sleeping for the next eight weeks will do me some good anyway. :)

Friday, August 18th

_18:19PM

Quote of the Day:

"Before there were Snakes on a Plane, there were Snakes on the Plain." - Chad Smith, Director of Hannah House

Tuesday, August 15th

_20:44PM

Wizard of Odds:

Remember the scene near the end of The Wizard of Oz where the Wizard hands out all the things that our heroes had been missing: a heart, a brain (or at least a certificate of thereof), a medal, all that sort of stuff? I'm having one of those moments myself, because now, for the first time ever, I have a Flying Logo!

Woo-hoo! That link again: Flying Logo! (it's ten seconds and just over half a meg in WMV format; feel free to download and play it if, for some reason, you feel like you haven't been forced to sit through enough flying logos at the beginning of movies so far today.)

Oh yeah, that's Bifrost Distribution, my domestic video distribution company, in case you didn't recognize the name. The tremendously talented Kevin Coppa was kind enough to do the animation for me from the layered photoshop file I'd sent him of the business cards I'd designed for the company. The mountains in the picture are the ones you see out my office window and the rainbow is actually one I took a picture of while stopped in traffic. The "lake" in the foreground I just made up. It was that or my desk, and I thought the simulated lake was spiffier. especially given how messy my desk gets sometimes.

It's not like I haven't released movies before, but in this case I'm coming out with Going Back (Bruce Campbell's second movie, long lost to the word due to horrendous legal mixups that have now been unmixed) and doing it in a bigger way. Come this October (I'll be spilling more details later), you should be seeing it on store shelves. In the meantime, I'll be going slightly bonkers trying to make sure everything is in place at the right time for the whole movie distribution system to work like it's supposed to. And, if it does, you'll be getting to watch my flying logo on the big screen. (Or little screen, depending on the size of your TV.) ...and Bruce Campbell too.

Me with Bruce Campbell. (I'm the one on the left.)

Thanks again go out to Kevin Coppa for putting together the flying logo so I can feel that much more real. --not that this necessarily actually makes me real and all that, but even Pinocchio gets to pretend sometimes, at least until he gives someone splinters.

Gotta get back to working on the advertising...and be warned, I'll be subjecting you to some of that, too, as it develops.

Wednesday, August 9th

_19:28PM

Less Baudy:

I started out the week with a documentary crew coming out here to do an interview on the early days of the internet and the era of dial-up BBSs and the like.

As part of the presentation, I pulled my very first modem ("awwwww") out of mothballs and set it up with a dumb terminal to re-create the circa-1980 internet experience for the documentary. I didn't have any dumb terminals that were nearly that old and still functioning, but I'm hoping my flagrant use of a piece of equipment from the 1990s wouldn't utterly destroy the audience's appreciation of the wonders of dialing numbers by hand, squooshing the handset into the acoustic coupler's cups, and then enjoying the treat of actual text oozing across the screen at 30 characters per second.

Yee-Haw! You know, if I threw together a few more exciting setups like this, I could turn it into a theme park. Really.

Sure, maybe some of them wouldn't be quite as exciting as the top rides at Disneyland, but I'm pretty sure I could made "300 baud dial-up" cheaper than "Space Mountain." I think it would all work out, just as soon as I can get a few poorly-paid attendants to dress up in giant plush costumes that look like computer components with legs and white gloves. I'll keep you posted.

my very first modem, still working as well as ever

On the other end of the line--that would be the server room in the basement--I'd set up a program to simulate one of the BBSs I'd used back in the early 80's. One that, if memory serves, never supported speeds above 300 baud, messages longer than ten lines, or lower-case letters.

But compared to the formerly ubiquitous Teletype Model 10's I'd used before then, that was still pretty luxurious and thirty characters per second was practically blazing. Bear in mind, too, back then the most common dumb terminal was the ADM-3a, whose standard configuration was upper-case only and supported just twelve lines of text. Twenty-four lines and lower-case letters were both upgrades that cost more than an entire new computer does today.

How things change. Nowadays any piece of computer equipment you can buy supports both upper and lower case letters--it's just the people *using* the equipment who don't. I don't know how much the upgrade to fix that costs. Or where you would stick the screwdriver when it came to installing it.

Isn't it scary that I remember all these details off the top of my head and didn't look any of it up or even have to pause to think a moment?

It's also a bit scary to think that my little recreation of the early days of the internet used equipment older than about 50% of the population currently on the net.

If not for the fact that I'd started programming before birth (which was kind of uncomfortable for my mother, but I think it was better than taking up ice-skating), this kind of thing would make me feel old.

In any event, it was pretty cool to be part of a documentary and flattering to have people not only sit still and listen to me babble about obsolete computer hardware, but actually fly out here from California for the experience. The program should be out sometime in the first half of next year, and I'll be sure to keep you updated when I hear more about when and where it'll be showing.

Saturday, August 5th

_13:24PM

x64-rated:

So far, the HVX-200 high-definition camcorder is pretty cool, though the software support for it isn't quite ready for prime-time.

Though I have to level the same complaint on Microsoft's Windows XP x64 edition. Part of that may be my fault, since I'd obviously misunderstood the "x64" as meaning "64-bit support," perhaps having previously been spoiled by the Sun and Linux worlds where such a thing is old hat or, if you happen to lean that way, Red Hat.

But my current theory is that "x64" is short for "expect to install this 64 times before it works or you give up and switch to a different OS."

Combining XP x64 with the HVX-200, at the very least, does yield bleeding-edge, state-of-the-art error messages. Unfortunately, I'm at a loss to explain the nature of these errors, because they are all in Japanese.

So, on Larry, the mobile video support computer, we've finally switched back to the 32-bit version of XP, a combination that at least yields error messages in English. And works. Sorta.

We'll see how it goes. But using a Canon XL-H1 camera tethered to a system like Larry through a Blackmagic Decklink HD card is starting to sound more appealing.

In the meantime, I'm experimenting with the XP x64 on another video computer with different hardware and, at least on that system, I think I may have been a little unfair in characterizing Microsoft's x64 OS as needing to be installed 64 times to get it right. Turns out it wasn't locking up after the drivers for the video card were installed after all. It just takes 40 minutes to boot up. Every single time.

So you don't have to reinstall the OS after installing a video card. It's just that it's faster. You can still just reboot the computer if you're not in a hurry.

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